Paraphrasing Jean-Luc Nancy we might affirm the truth of violence and the violence oftruth. 1 The truth of violence is lived and can be mediated through moving images—blowsto the head, emaciated bodies, gunfire, disease. The brute, idiotic truth of violence is thatit never cares for others. The violence of truth, on the other hand, is eventual—it reopenscommon sense, cynical inertia, and untenable situations. It needs alliances toemerge—artists, philosophers, journalists, informed publics in good faith, honestmediatic regimes. The violence of truth is, if not revolutionary, revelatory, and it disturbsthe present order. But what does it mean to know the truth of a situation—and forexample, the current situation in Venezuela? Homeland’s Agenda attempts to focus onthis with impelling urgency, but befitting the dire complexity of the country’s socio-politics, without offering easy answers. The work employs a general equivalence ofmedia—public government broadcasting, propaganda, diverse Internet corporate newschannels, pop music lyrics, video testimonials of disparate polish—so that eachsuccessive clip does not necessarily dominate the others. The result is a distillation ofcontent, as form frequently coerces its own interpretation. The transcript provides asimilar democraticization of content, revealing a complex situation that is otherwiseimpossible to experience for audiences not initiated in the local geopolitical context.

How one takes these stills from moving images depends on how one receives propernames—Bolívar, Chavez, Maduro, Capriles—as well as where one stands in relation tothe present possibilities or limitations of state Socialism, neoliberal economics, directDemocracy, and the communes (all of which being conditioned by one’s ideologicalposition within mediatic ecologies of transparency or bias). All this to say that there arethree major players: socialist governance that represents the people but is always indanger of falling into an authoritarian kleptocracy; a global neoliberal economy that tendsto insist on being good medicine for states that do not fully consent to realpolitikpressures, setting up the conditions for communal failures and rising inequalities; and ademos that is both conceptually and geographically split between a genuine and fake left,the faux-populist opposition of elites, people opposing the government simply for reasonsof survival, criminal gangs, and various rogues serving popular, state, or private interests.

Homeland’s Agenda also underscores the key objects at play: essential goods, medicine,guns, the Internet, natural resources, drugs, prisons, televisions, currency. The situationrevolves around these objects as much as the macro ideological antagonisms describedabove. Within such times of crisis, perhaps these objects demonstrate a cracking open ofthe commodity fetish and its attendant culture. Within conditions of hyperinflation, onecan no longer pretend that money is a miraculous object (it becomes simply paper thatcan be torn up like any other). More broadly, it can no longer be ignored that it iscommodities that mediate social relations (at the expense of other relations, or evenobjects of need). Once this becomes manifest, the smooth functioning of an economy

based on heedless consumption falters, revealing the normally disavowed perversity of,say, the availability of luxury goods among intense hunger and privation.

The source materials span from 2011 to 2016 and bear witness to the development of ahumanitarian crisis and ensuing civil protests of national scale that have promptedgovernmental repression though the police, military, and the media in 2017.